Quick tips for those having trouble with their splash screens in lucid.

Plymouth replaces Usplash as the default boot splash program in lucid lynx. Some users have found that either they do not see the splash at all on startup or only for a split second before the login screen appears.

At present there are only a few Plymouth themes available in the repositories. Open synaptic and type Plymouth into the quick search field to see a list of the available themes.

after entering “sudo update-alternatives –config default.plymouth” it says “There is only one alternative in link group default.plymouth: /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo/ubuntu-logo.plymouth
Nothing to configure.”

Sasan – Open synaptic and search for plymouth, you should see a list of available themes. Solar is my personal preference, Spinfinity is also nice but it doesn’t make it all the way through to gnome startup on my machine for some reason.

@Sasan: you can have some plymouth themes to choose if you install them via Synaptic. As for me (like Intosamadhi) Solar plymouth theme is good and run well. Don’t choose Spinfinity because you can see login screen after it appears. If you hit this difficulty you can press Ctrl+Alt+F7 to be go through login screen. Good luck to you!

Thanks for the tips – unfortunately, try as I might, I just can’t get this to work. The splash screen just displays a simple text image (which I think is actually plymouth-themes-text) rather than the desired wallpaper.
I’ve tried various things including subsitituting the new simple script into the default ubuntu-logo folder and editing the script appropriately, but with no success.

A quick update for anyone that’s interested. I’ve found that a blank theme – with the simple.script file referred to in the article left empty – gives a more old-fashioned, purely text boot and shutdown. That at least aids me in my goal to remove all purple from Ubuntu 10.04!
Would still be nice to get a simple wallpaper theme to work though…

mindmusic – make sure you execute: sudo update-initramfs -u
after installing the new theme and selecting it as the default. If you didn’t get any errors when installing the theme or selecting it from the list it should be working.

@intosamadhi
Thanks for the reply, but alas I was including that step. There were some other oddnesses too that lead me to suspect a bug in plymouth or elsewhere (particularly since I’ve had problems with my laptop’s graphics chip previously) – but in any case I’m happy enough now I’ve got rid of the purple, and can’t really afford to spend more time on it.
Thanks!

My initial attempt to create the simple wallpaper theme was unsuccessful, as I was getting a syntax error on the first line of the script file. I looked at the ubuntu-logo theme file and followed its example for my first two lines:

Thanks for the great tip. This helped me to see my splash again. Although after the spinfinity splash I was only left with a black screen, I am still satisfied that the other themes work well. BTW, I also can finally see my tty terminals.

I can’t get this to work. I tried both your way and Ken’s instructions. Plymouth uses the right image on shutdown, but nothing during boot. Does the image dimensions or mode matter somehow? I have an 800×500 (72dpi) RGB .png for 1680×1050 screen.

Great article. One problem I ran into was where after installing a new kernel it would not show my theme anymore but rather would always show the default ubuntu text theme. The fix was to edit /etc/default/grub and add this line:

GRUB_GFX_PAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

Voila, themes work again. Thanks again for your post, this was a great help.

you can also use Super-Boot-Manager to create and install your own plymouth themes. a few come with the app, but the creator is a bit cookie cutter. As someone who is a noob to code, creating a truly original splash has been a bit challenging to say the least. i almost want to use foul language.